Research Areas

Operations Research

Biomedical Engineering

Biosketch

Dionne Aleman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. She received her PhD in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Florida (2007), MSc from the University of Florida (2006), and BSc from the University of Florida (2003).

Dr. Aleman's research interests are in the application of operations research to medical and healthcare systems. This research includes using mathematical optimization models to design radiation therapy treatment plans, using agent-based simulation to predict the spread of a pandemic disease in an urban population, using graph theory to determine vaccination priorities during a pandemic, and using optimization and simulation to improve hospital surgical scheduling. Dr. Aleman has held grants from NSERC, CFI, ORF, and NSF for her research. Within the Canadian Operational Research Society (CORS), she is the Vice President/President-Elect and a past Secretary of CORS Council, and the Secretary of the Health Care Operations Research Special Interest Group. Within the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS), she is the President of the Public Sector OR Section, and she is a past Chair of the Health Applications Society (HAS) and past President of the Junior Faculty Interest Group (JFIG). Dr. Aleman is also a Topical Editor for the Wiley Encyclopedia of Operations Research and Management Science, Associate Editor for IIE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering, Associate Editor for the International Journal of Biomedical Data Mining, and Editorial Board Member of Operations Research in Health Care.

Research Areas

Thermal and Fluid Sciences Engineering

Biomedical Engineering

Energy and Environmental Engineering

Biosketch

Cristina Amon has been the Dean of the University of Toronto's Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering and Alumni Professor of Bioengineering in Mechanical & Industrial Engineering since 2006. She received her Mechanical Engineering diploma from Simón Bolívar University, and her MS and ScD degrees in 1988 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Prior to her leadership at the University of Toronto, she was the Raymond J. Lane Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems at Carnegie Mellon University.

A pioneer in the development of Computational Fluid Dynamics for formulating thermal design solutions subject to multidisciplinary competing constraints, she conducts research in nanoscale thermal transport in semiconductors, energy systems and bioengineered devices.

Dean Amon serves on the BoD of MKS Instruments Inc., a leading global provider for advanced manufacturing of semiconductor devices, energy generation and electro-optical products. She is chair of the research committee of NCDEAS (National Council of Deans of Engineering and Applied Science), past chair of the Global Engineering Deans Council, and has served on advisory boards for several institutions including Stanford, UCLA, UIUC and Waterloo.

Cristina Amon has received numerous professional and leadership awards, including the ASME Gustus Larson Memorial Award, ASEE Westinghouse Medal, ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award, and the Society of Women Engineers' Achievement Award. In 2012 she was recognized as one of Canada's most Influential Women. She was inducted to four academies: Canadian Academy of Engineering, Spanish Royal Academy, Royal Society of Canada and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. She is an elected fellow of all major professional societies in her field and has authored over 350 refereed articles in education and research literature.

Research Areas

Energy and Environmental Engineering

Thermal and Fluid Sciences Engineering

Biosketch

Dr. Nasser Ashgriz is a professor of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. Prior to U of T, he was a Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York. He obtained his BS (1979), MS (1981), and PhD (1984) degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, where he was the recipient of two Bennet Prize awards (1981, 1983) in recognition of outstanding scholarly work in Mechanical Engineering.

He has been a visiting scientist at several national laboratories including NASA Lewis Research Center and Phillips Laboratory at Edwards Air Force Base. He has received several awards including the Ralph Teetor Award from Society of Automotive Engineers (1988), The Best Picture Award, from the American Physical Society (1988), the Best Paper Award, from the Combustion Institute (1992), and TOKTEN Award from the United Nations Development Program (1995). He is also the holder of a patent on MultiOrifice Impulsed Spray Generator, Patent No. 4,667,877. Dr. Ashgriz has been a member and has held offices in various professional societies (e.g., ASME K-11 Committee, "Heat Transfer in Fire and Combustion Systems," ASME Winter Annual Meeting, American Physical Society, the Combustion Institute, and the Institute for Liquid Atomization and Spray Systems).

Biosketch

Fae Azhari received her BSc and MASc degrees in Civil engineering from Isfahan University of Technology and the University of British Columbia, respectively. After working in the industry for a few years, she returned to school and completed her MEng degree in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at the University of California, Berkeley, and her PhD in Structural Engineering and Mechanics at the University of California, Davis.
Fae is interested in structural health monitoring (SHM) and prognosis of engineering systems. Her main areas of research are twofold: (I) sensor development and assessing the performance of novel sensing devices, and (II) developing decision-making frameworks that use probabilistic models to translate collected data into meaningful information and efficient remedial strategies for various infrastructure systems.

Research Areas

Thermal and Fluid Sciences Engineering

Energy and Environmental Engineering

Biosketch

Aimy Bazylak joined the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto in 2008. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Engineering Physics from the University of Saskatchewan, and her MASc and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Victoria, where she specialized in numerical and experimental investigations of microfluidic and polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs). Professor Bazylak is the principal investigator of the TEAM Lab, where she leads a talented team of postgraduate researchers. She is the Associate Director of the Institute for Sustainable Energy (ISE) and also the Associate Director for the NSERC CREATE Program in Distributed Generation for Remote Communities (DGRC).

Her research interests include transport phenomena in PEMFCs, PEM electrolyzers, microfluidic fuel cells, multiphase flow in porous media, clean energy technologies, and energy sustainability. In 2011, Prof. Bazylak received the I.W. Smith Award from the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering, and in 2012 she received an Early Researcher Award from the Government of Ontario.

Biosketch

Lecturer Bazylak brings his engineering, education, and design experience to his role at the University of Toronto. He currently coordinates an award winning first year design course (Engineering Strategies and Practice), instructs a core third year Mechanical engineering course (Design for Environment), manages the MIE Undergraduate Design Facilities, and conducts action-based research into improving the learning experience of undergraduate engineering students.

Lecturer Bazylak started his career as a manufacturing engineer in a new product introduction division of a large telecommunication manufacturer. He returned to academia joining the University of Victoria first as an engineering co-operative education coordinator and then as an engineer-in-residence. He joined the University of Toronto as a Lecturer where he is heavily involved in design education and sustainable practices. He most recently won the Green Ribbon award for his environmentally sustainable classroom practices.

Area of Interest

Action-based research into engineering education practices

Impact assessment of engineering educational methods

Studies in diversity in engineering, specifically women and aboriginals

Effectiveness of educational technology both inside and outside the classroom

Research Areas

Operations Research

Information Engineering

Biosketch

J. Christopher Beck is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. He received his PhD from the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto in 1999 on the topic of knowledge-based heuristic search algorithms for constraint-directed scheduling. Chris then spent three years on the Scheduler Team at ILOG, SA (now part of IBM) in Paris, France, developing industrial constraint-directed scheduling software. He then was a Staff Scientist at the Cork Constraint Computation Centre in Cork, Ireland for two years. Since 2004, he has been at the University of Toronto. Professor Beck’s research interests continue to include scheduling, heuristic search, and constraint programming but have widened to include hybrid optimization combining mixed-integer programming and constraint programming, constraint integer programming, optimization under uncertainty, queueing theory, online algorithms, and multi-agent negotiation for coupled combinatorial optimization problems.

Professor Beck holds editorial positions at the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research; Constraints (Letters Editor); Constraint Programming Letters; the Knowledge Engineering Review; and the Mathematical Programming Glossary. Chris has served as program chair or chair of four international conferences and symposia and is the President-Elect of the Executive Council for the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling.

Research Areas

Applied Mechanics and Design

Advanced Manufacturing and Materials Engineering

Biomedical Engineering

Biosketch

Professor Kamran Behdinan earned his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Victoria in British Columbia in 1996, and has considerable experience in both academic and industrial settings. Dr. Behdinan was appointed to the academic staff of Ryerson University in 1998, tenured and promoted to the level of associate professor in 2002 and subsequently to the level of Professor in 2007 and served as the director of the aerospace engineering program (2002-03), and the founding Chair of the newly established Department of Aerospace Engineering (2007-03 and 2007-11). He has joined the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto, in the rank of Full Professor in September 2011. He is the NSERC Chair in Multidisciplinary Engineering Design, sponsored by NSERC, University of Toronto, and thirteen companies including Bomabardier, Pratt & Whitney Canada, Goodrich, Magna, Ford, and DRDC Toronto. He is the founding director of the Institute for Multidisciplinary Design & Innovation (UT-IMDI) an industry centred project-based learning institute in partnership with major aerospace and automotive companies.

Professor Behdinan is the past President of the Canadian Society of Mechanical Engineering (2010-2012), and served as a member of the technical and scholarship committees of the High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory. He is the founding director and principal Advanced Research Laboratory for Multifunctional Lightweight Structures, funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and Ontario Research Fund.

His research interests include design and development of light-weight structures for aerospace, automotive, and nuclear applications, multidisciplinary design optimization of aerospace and automotive systems, multi-scale simulation of nano-structured materials and composites at elevated temperature. He has supervised 17 PhDs, 60 Masters, and 9 postdoctoral fellows. He has also published more than 90 peer-reviewed journal papers and 140 conference papers, and 6 book chapters. He has been the recipient of many prestigious awards and recognitions such as the Research fellow of Pratt & Whitney Canada, fellow of the CSME, and the Ryerson FEAS research awards in 2004 and 2010.

Research Areas

Robotics

Mechatronics and Instrumentation

Applied Mechanics and Design

Biomedical Engineering

Biosketch

R. Ben Mrad, P.Eng., FCSME, is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto. He joined the University in 1997, having previously held research positions at the National Research Council of Canada in Vancouver, BC, and the Ford Research Laboratory in Dearborn, Michigan. He received a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1994.

Professor Ben Mrad’s research interests are Mechatronics and Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) with a special focus on the design of pieozceramic actuators and sensors, microactuators and microfluidic systems, MEMS fabrication, thin film pieozoelectrics and development of smart materials based devices. His research led to a number of patents and inventions including 9 US patents/patent applications. He has supervised the research of over 55 graduate students and researchers, received the Faculty Early Career Teaching Award in 2002, and the Connaught Innovation Award in 2013 and 2015.

He serves on the NSERC Mechanical Engineering Grants Committee (2008-2011), chairs the IEEE Industrial Electronics Committee on MEMS and Nanotechnology, and serves on the Executive Board of the CanSmart Group. He is currently a Technical Editor of the IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, Editor of IE Tech News, and serves on the Steering Committee of the IEEE/ASME JMEMS. He was also a Guest Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics. He also served as a founding Director of the Institute for Robotics and Mechatronics at the University of Toronto (2009-11).

Research Areas

Advanced Manufacturing and Materials Engineering

Biomedical Engineering

Robotics

Mechatronics and Instrumentation

Applied Mechanics and Design

Biosketch

Beno Benhabib, P.Eng., joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Toronto in 1986, and is currently a Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering and in the Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering. His research interests are in the area of design and control of intelligent autonomous systems. He is also a member of the NSERC Canadian Network for Research and Innovation in Machining Technology. His research in the past 25 years was supported by over 100 Masters and Doctoral Students, as well as a large number Postdoctoral Fellows and Research Engineers, with an overall funding level of almost $4M. Their combined effort has resulted in over 325 international journal and conference publications, as well as several book chapters. He is also the author of the book Manufacturing: Design, Production, Automation, and Integration.

Professor Benhabib serves as the Editor-at-Large, Americas, for the Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems, and as the Associate Editor for the Journal of Quality and Standards. He is also a member in the Canadian Council for Theory of Machines and Mechanisms, as well as in the Mechatronics Technical Committee, the International Federation of the Theory of Machines and Mechanisms.

Research Areas

Robotics

Mechatronics and Instrumentation

Energy and Environmental Engineering

Applied Mechanics and Design

Biosketch

Amy Bilton joined the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering as an Assistant Professor in January 2014. She completed her BASc at the University of Toronto in Engineering Science (Aerospace Option) and her MS at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Aeronautics and Astronautics. After completing her MS, Dr. Bilton worked as a Systems Engineer at Pratt & Whitney Canada and Honeywell Aerospace. She then returned MIT where she completed her PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics and continued as a Postdoctoral Associate.

Dr. Bilton's research lies at the intersection of developing theoretical design and control techniques and developing new physical electromechanical systems. Applications of her research include water purification systems, desalination systems, and renewable energy. Her current work is focused on deployment of a newly developed solar-powered water purification system in the developing world.

Biosketch

Merve Bodur was a postdoctoral researcher in H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. She obtained her Ph.D. from University of Wisconsin-Madison in Industrial and Systems Engineering. She received her B.S. in Industrial Engineering and B.A. in Mathematics degrees from Bogazici University, Turkey. Her research interests include integer programming, stochastic programming, multiobjective integer programming and combinatorial optimization with applications in service systems staffing and scheduling and network interdiction problems.

Research Areas

Energy and Environmental Engineering

Thermal and Fluid Sciences Engineering

Biosketch

Markus Bussmann is a Professor in Mechanical & Industrial Engineering (MIE) at the University of Toronto, and the Vice-Dean, Graduate Studies for the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. Professor Bussmann holds BASc (1987) and MASc (1990) degrees from the University of Waterloo, and a PhD (2000) from the University of Toronto. He then spent 2½ years as a postdoc and staff member at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, joined U of T in 2002, and served as Graduate Coordinator of MIE from 2009-2013.

Professor Bussmann’s research interests focus on the development and application of models for interfacial flow, heat transfer, and phase change associated with various materials processes, often in collaboration with other researchers. Applications include the control of boiler fouling, melting and dissolution processes in molten metals, fluid/fluid/particle separation and coating processes, and heat exchanger design. Professor Bussmann was named a fellow of the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering in 2011.

Research Areas

Biomedical Engineering

Operations Research

Biosketch

Michael Carter is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto (since 1981) and Director of the Centre for Research in Healthcare Engineering. He received his doctorate in Mathematics from the University of Waterloo in 1980. Since 1989, his research focus has been in the area of health care resource modeling with a variety of projects in hospitals, home care, rehab, long term care, medical labs and mental health institutions. He has supervised more than 160 engineering students in over 100 projects with healthcare institutions. He currently has 17 graduate students (7 doctoral, 10 masters) working in the area. He was the winner of the Annual Practice Prize from the Canadian Operational Research Society (CORS) four times (1988, 1992, 1996 and 2009). In 2000, he received the CORS Award of Merit for lifetime contributions to Canadian Operational Research. He also received an “Excellence in Teaching” Award from the University of Toronto Student Administrative Council. He is on the editorial board for the journals “Health Care Management Science”, “Operations Research for Healthcare”, “Health Systems” and “IIE Transactions on Healthcare Systems”. He is a member of the “Nursing Effectiveness, Utilization and Outcomes Research Unit” and a mentor in the “Health Care, Technology and Place” program at the University of Toronto. He is on the Advisory Board for the Regenstreif Centre for Healthcare Engineering at Purdue University, an Adjunct Scientist with the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto and a member of the Faculty Advisory Council for the UofT Chapter of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). He is member of the Professional Engineers of Ontario. In 2012, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering and in 2013, he was inducted as a Fellow of INFORMS, the international society for Operations Research and Management Science.

Research Areas

Biomedical Engineering

Operations Research

Biosketch

Timothy Chan is the Canada Research Chair in Novel Optimization and Analytics in Health, an Associate Professor in the department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering and the Director of the Centre for Healthcare Engineering at the University of Toronto. He received his BSc in Applied Mathematics from the University of British Columbia (2002), and his PhD in Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2007). Professor Chan was an Associate in the Chicago office of McKinsey and Company, a global management consulting firm (2007-2009). During that time, he advised leading companies in the fields of medical device technology, travel and hospitality, telecommunications, and energy on issues of strategy, organization, technology and operations.

Professor Chan’s primary research interests are in optimization under uncertainty and the application of optimization methods to problems in healthcare, medicine, global engineering, sustainability, and sports. He received the George B. Dantzig Dissertation Award from INFORMS (2007), an Early Researcher Award from the Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation of Ontario (2012), an Early Career Teaching Award from both the U of T Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (2012) and the U of T Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering (2013), second place in the INFORMS Section on Public Programs, Service and Needs best paper competition (2012), and first place in the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference research paper competition (2013). His research has been featured by the CBC, CTV News, the Toronto Star, and Canadian Business magazine.

Research Areas

Thermal and Fluid Sciences Engineering

Energy and Environmental Engineering

Biosketch

Sanjeev Chandra is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering (MIE) at the University of Toronto, which he joined in 1990. He received his BTech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (1981) his MS from Vanderbilt University (1983) and PhD from Cornell University (1990). He has served as the Acting Chair, Associate Chair (undergraduate studies), Associate Chair (graduate studies) and Vice-Chair of the MIE Department, and Acting Vice-Dean (undergraduate studies) of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering.

Professor Chandra is known internationally for his research on the dynamics of droplets and sprays. His research spans the areas of combustion, fluid mechanics, heat transfer and materials science and has also been applied in spray coating, spray cooling, fuel combustion and waste heat recovery. Prof. Chandra has published over 200 papers in referred journals and international conference proceedings. He teaches courses in thermodynamics and heat transfer and has served as visiting professor at the University of Limoges (France) Korea University (S. Korea), University of Bremen (Germany) and the University of Darmstadt (Germany).

In 2015 Professor Chandra was awarded the Jules Stachiewicz medal for Heat Transfer by the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering. In 2010 he was awarded the The Brockhouse Canada Prize for Interdisciplinary Research, awarded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to recognize outstanding collaborative research. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Research Areas

Information Engineering

Human Factors/Ergonomics

Biosketch

Mark Chignell has been a member of the Mechanical & Industrial Engineering faculty since 1990. Prior to that he was an Assistant Professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California from 1984 to 1990. Professor Chignell taught in the Psychology Department at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia from 1980 to 1982. He has a PhD in Psychology (University of Canterbury, New Zealand, 1981), and an MS in Industrial and Systems Engineering (Ohio State, 1984). He is currently the Director of the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto, and the BUL Chair in Human Computer Interaction. He has been a visiting scientist at the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies in Toronto since 2002 and he was a visiting scientist at Keio University from 2005 to 2010.

Professor Chignell has co-authored books on expert systems and intelligent databases (published by John Wiley & Sons) and he has co-edited three books. He has many journal and conference papers on topics such as hypertext and information retrieval, user interface design and healthcare applications. His research has been funded by the Bell University Laboratories, the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), IBM, the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE), the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, TELUS, Oki Corporation, Ricoh Corporation, and Apple Computer. He has founded two start-up companies, and currently runs Vocalage Inc., a high tech consulting and product development firm.

Research Areas

Information Engineering

Biosketch

Mariano Consens received his PhD and MSc degrees in Computer Science from the University of Toronto. He also holds a Computer Systems Engineer degree from the Universidad de la Republica, Uruguay. Professor Consens has over 60 publications, including journal publications selected from best conference papers and several patents.

Professor Consens has been a faculty member in Information Engineering in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto, since 2003. Before that, he was research faculty member at the School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, from 1994 to 1999. In addition, he has been active in the software industry as a founder, director, and CTO of a couple of software start-ups. He was as a Visiting Scientist at Yahoo! Research during his sabbatical, and is currently a Visiting Scientist at the IBM Center for Advanced Studies in Toronto.

Research Areas

Thermal and Fluid Sciences Engineering

Biosketch

Iain G. Currie holds a Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Strathclyde, a Masters degree from the University of British Columbia, and a PhD from the California Institute of Technology. He has taught fluid mechanics at the undergraduate and graduate levels at the University of Toronto since he joined the academic staff in 1966. During the period 1993 to 1998 he served as the Chair of the Department. This period includes the merger of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Industrial Engineering in 1996 to form the present Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering.

Dr. Currie’s research involves fluid structure interactions, and recently he has become involved in studying low Reynolds number flows involving both Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids. He is the founder and Director of the Flow Measurements Laboratory, a facility which utilizes LDA and PIV flow measurement techniques. He is the author of the well known graduate text entitled Fundamental Mechanics of Fluids, the 4th edition of which was published by CRC Press in 2012.

Research Areas

Biomedical Engineering

Robotics

Mechatronics and Instrumentation

Applied Mechanics and Design

Biosketch

Eric Diller received his BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH. He received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, where he continued as a postdoctoral researcher before joining the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering in 2014.

Dr. Diller’s work focuses on micro-scale robotics and bio-inspired novel locomotion systems, and features fabrication and control relating to remote actuation of micro-scale devices using magnetic fields, micro-scale robotic manipulation, smart materials, and swimming at low Reynolds number. He received first place in the NIST Mobile Microrobotics Microassembly Challenge in 2012 in St. Paul, MN and received the G. Sundback Graduate Fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University.

Research Areas

Human Factors/Ergonomics

Biosketch

Professor Birsen Donmez joined the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering in January 2010. She received her BS in Mechanical Engineering from Bogazici University in 2001, her MS (2004) and PhD (2007) in industrial engineering, and her MS in statistics (2007) from the University of Iowa. Before joining the University of Toronto, she spent two years as a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Professor Donmez’s research interests are centered on understanding and improving human behavior and performance in multi-task and complex situations, using a wide range of analytical techniques. In particular, her research focuses on operator attention in multitask activities, decision support under uncertainty, and human automation interaction, with applications in various domains including surface transportation, healthcare, mining, and unmanned vehicle operations. Professor Donmez received the inaugural Stephanie Binder Young Professional Award from the HFES Surface Transportation Technical Group (2014), an Early Researcher Award from the Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation of Ontario (2015), the Early Career Teaching Award from the U of T Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (2013), a Connaught New Researcher Award from the University of Toronto (2011), the Dr. Charles H. Miller Best Paper Award from the Canadian Association of Road Safety Professionals (2010), and a Dwight David Eisenhower Graduate Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Transportation (2006). Her research has been featured by the Global TV News, the Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star.

Research Areas

Advanced Manufacturing and Materials Engineering

Applied Mechanics and Design

Biosketch

Tobin Filleter is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. Prior to joining the MIE department at U of T, Dr. Filleter was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University (2009-2012). Dr. Filleter received a BSc (Eng.) in Engineering Physics from Queen’s University (2003) and PhD in Physics from McGill University (2009). During his PhD Dr. Filleter also spent time in Germany as a visiting scientist at the INM-Leibniz Institute for New Materials.

Professor Filleter's research interests are in nanomechanics and nanotribology. Specific areas of research include size-scale plasticity in nanostructures, energy efficient nanomaterials, friction and wear of ultrathin films, in-situ electron microscopy testing, MEMS, and multi-scale mechanics. He has authored papers in many top international journals including Nano Letters, Advanced Materials, ACS Nano, Small, and Physical Review Letters. He is the recipient of several major awards including the 2014 I.W. Smith Award.

Research Areas

Information Engineering

Biosketch

Dr. Fox received his BSc in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1975, and his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1983. In 1979 he was a founding member of the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University as well as the founding Director of the Intelligent Systems Laboratory within the Institute. He co-founded Carnegie Group Inc. in 1984, a software company that specialized in Artificial Intelligence-based systems for solving engineering, manufacturing, and telecommunications problems, and was its Vice-President of Engineering and President/CEO. Carnegie Mellon University appointed him Associate Professor of Computer Science and Robotics in 1987 (with tenure in 1991). In 1988 he was the founding Director of the Center for Integrated Manufacturing Decision Systems at Carnegie Mellon. In 1991, Dr. Fox returned to the University of Toronto where he was appointed the NSERC Research Chairholder in Enterprise Integration, and Professor of Industrial Engineering and Computer Science. In 1992, he was appointed Director of the Collaborative Program in Integrated Manufacturing. In 1993, Dr. Fox co-founded and was CEO Novator Systems Ltd., a pioneer in E-Retail software and services. From 1994-98 is represented Canada on the Intelligent Manufacturing Systems Global Program Scientific Committee. In 2013 he was appointed a Senior Fellow of the Global Cities Institute at the University of Toronto, and an Academic Advisor to the iCity Lab, Singapore Management University.In 2014, he was the founding director of the Centre for Social Services Engineering in the Faculty of Applied Sciences and Engineering who goal is to apply engineering principles to the design and delivery of social services to the vulnerable in our society.In 2015 he was named a University of Toronto Distinguished Professor of Urban Systems Engineering.

Dr. Fox's early research pioneered the application of Organization Theory to the design of distributed systems, contributing to the formation of multi-agent systems and Coordination Theory. His scheduling research resulted in the creation of the field of Constraint-Directed Scheduling within Artificial Intelligence, and several commercially successful scheduling systems and companies. He also pioneered the application of Artificial Intelligence to project management, simulation, and engineering design. He was the designer of one of the first commercial industrial applications of expert systems: PDS/GENAID, a steam turbine and generator diagnostic system for Westinghouse, which was a recipient of the IR100 in 1985 and is still in commercial use today at Siemens, monitoring over 1000 turbines and generators worldwide. He was the co-creator of the Knowledge Representation SRL from which Knowledge Craft™, a commercial knowledge engineering tool, was derived, and KBS, from which several commercial knowledge-based simulation tools, including Simulation Craft™, were derived. He co-developed the primary methodology used globally for designing ontologies based on Competency Questions. He led the well-known TOVE project that developed ontologies for modelling the structure, resources and behaviour of enterprises. His current research focuses on the ontologies and common-sense reasoning, and their application to Smart Cities. He has developed ontologies for the representation of city information and knowledge that are being adopted by cities around the world.

Dr. Fox was elected a Fellow of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 1991, a Joint Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and PRECARN in 1992, a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada in 2009, and a recipient of the CP Rail Medal in 2011. He is a past AAAI councillor, and co-founder of the AAAI Special Interest Group in AI in Manufacturing. Dr. Fox has published over 200 papers.

Research Areas

Operations Research

Biosketch

After obtaining a PhD from MIE in 1974, joined University of Manitoba as an Assistant Professor. In 1976, he moved back to Toronto and joined Ontario Hydro (predecessor of Hydro One, Ontario Power Generation, and IESO), developing and implementing various Operations Research models, and later managing the groups responsible, for improved operation of the Ontario Power System, including non-linear network optimization models, and database models. Upon joining MIE, Dr. Frances taught various courses in the OR and Information Systems areas, as well as consulting assignments with various organizations including OPG, Hatch, Pratt & Whitney, Canadian Blood Services and Victoria Order of Nurses.

Research Areas

Robotics

Mechatronics and Instrumentation

Biosketch

Dr. Goldenberg is the founder of the field of Robotics at University of Toronto where he has been since 1982 as a Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, cross appointed in the Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering, and previously cross-appointed in the Electrical and Computer Engineering. Dr. Goldenberg is also an Adjunct Professor at Ryerson University and Guest Professor at Nanjing University of Science and Technology, P.R. China. From 1975-1981 Dr. Goldenberg has been an employee of SPAR Aerospace Ltd., of Toronto, working on the development of the first Space Shuttle Remote Manipulator System (Canadarm).

Dr. Goldenberg has supervised the largest number of graduate students in the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering (46 PhD and 64 MASc). He has an exceptional publication recordwith over 4500 citations (128 archival journal papers, 294 papers in major conferences, 15 book chapters and 55 patents granted and applied). The citations count is the highest in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and one of the highest in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering.

Though now a Professor Emeritus, since 2011, he maintains a full time load of graduate students and research. He is currently involved in technology development projects that include: mobile and modular robots, medical surgery robots, robots for hazardous environments, smart materials, and expert systems.

Dr. Andrew Goldenberg, PhD, is the founder and President of Engineering Services Inc. (ESI) - www.esit.com, established in 1982. ESI is a high-technology company involved in the development of robotics-based automation. Under his leadership the company has achieved significant growth and a global leading role in a wide range of industrial sectors. From 2000-2001 Dr. Goldenberg was also the President of Virtek Engineering Science Inc. (VESI), a high-technology company formed after the acquisition of part of ESI by Virtek Vision International Ltd., a publicly-listed company. Dr. Goldenberg is also President of Anviv Mechatronics Inc. (AMI), which he founded in 2006. Anviv is a high-technology company involved in the development of mechatronics products. Since May 2015 ESI has been acquired by a Chinese consortium located in Shenzhen, P.R. China.
Dr. Goldenberg is a Life Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE), a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada (EIC), a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering (CAE), a Fellow of The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Member of the Professional Engineers of Ontario (PEng), and a Designated Consulting Engineer in Ontario. He is the recipient of the 2010 PEO Engineering Medal for Entrepreneurship and the 2013 EIC Sir John Kennedy Medal for Outstanding Merit in the Engineering Profession.

Dr. Goldenberg is a former editor of the archival international journal IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, and a member of the editorial boards of Robotica, Robotics in Japan, Journal of Robotics, Robotics Journal, Scientific World Journal, Industrial Engineering and Management Journal, SOJ Robotics and Automation and International Journal of Automation and Computing.

Dr. Goldenberg obtained his PhD in 1976 from the University of Toronto, and his MSc and BSc degrees from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in 1969 and 1972, respectively. Dr. Goldenberg was born in Bucharest, Romania.

Research Areas

Information Engineering

Biosketch

Michael Grüninger is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. He returned to Canada after spending five years as an Assistant Research Scientist in the Institute for Systems Research at the University of Maryland College Park and also a Guest Researcher at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST).Before that, Michael was a Senior Research Scientist in the Enterprise Integration Laboratory of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. Michael received his Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Computer Science at the University of Toronto and his B.Sc. in Computer Science at the University of Alberta.

His current research focuses on the design and formal characterization of theories in mathematical logic and their application to problems in manufacturing and enterprise engineering. His most recent work on the Process Specification Language has been published as an International Standard (ISO 18629).

Research Areas

Biomedical Engineering

Thermal and Fluid Sciences Engineering

Advanced Manufacturing and Materials Engineering

Biosketch

The Guenther Research Group draws from the areas of fluid mechanics, colloidal material synthesis, as well as micro/nanofabrication. We investigate fundamentals of transport processes associated with micro/nanoscale flows and aim at translating these fundamentals into unique and powerful technical solutions. We are particularly interested in realizing dynamically changing microenvironments for applications in materials science and biomedicine. Current applications include the controlled preparation of colloidal nanostructures in microreactors, high-throughput platforms for functional tests of small blood vessels with relevance to biopharmaceutical drug discovery, and microfluidic strategies for probing cellular decision processes.

Research Areas

Biomedical Engineering

Biosketch

David F. James is currently Professor Emeritus of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, having joined the Department in 1967 after his PhD from the California Institute of Technology. He is still active in research and teaching. His research is related to fluid mechanics, especially the flow of complex liquids such as suspensions, solutions and pastes. His research interests include rheology, elastic liquids, non-Newtonian fluid mechanics, and his speciality is the fluid mechanics of polymeric liquids.

Professor James has received several teaching awards from the Department, and in 1984 he received the first Teaching Award given by the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. He continues to be involved in teaching, as a Teaching Mentor for the Faculty, typically advising his junior colleagues.

Professor James’ research has been recognized through the 2011 Annual Award from the British Society of Rheology and the S.G. Mason Award from the Canadian Society of Rheology (2005), as well as through prestigious appointments at other universities, including the Chevron Visiting Professor at Caltech, the University Visiting Professor at Monash University, the Commonwealth Fellowship at St. John’s College and a Visiting Fellowship at Trinity College, both at the University of Cambridge.

His primary administrative service has been the Chair of the Division of Engineering Science at the University of Toronto (1991-95) and as the Secretary of the International Committee of Rheology (1988-2004).

Research Areas

Human Factors/Ergonomics

Biosketch

Greg A. Jamieson is Associate Professor and Clarice Chalmers Chair of Engineering Design in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. He received Bachelor of Science degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Psychology (with Distinction) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Masters of Applied Science and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Human Factors Engineering from the University of Toronto. He Directs the Cognitive Engineering Laboratory, which conducts applied human factors engineering research in the natural resource and energy industries.

Research Areas

Operations Research

Biosketch

Dr. Andrew K.S. Jardine is Founding Director of the Centre for Maintenance Optimization & Reliability Engineering (C-MORE). He is author of economic life software AGE/CON and PERDEC, licensed to organizations in the transportation, mining, electrical utilities, and process industries, and author of OREST software used for optimizing component preventive replacement decisions and forecasting demand for spare parts. In addition to writing software, C-MORE has developed and commercialised two software packages: EXAKT for the optimization of condition based maintenance decisions and SMS for optimization of stock holding policies for slow-moving expensive capital spares

Dr. Jardine is a prolific researcher and advocate of advances in maintenance decision-making and reliability engineering. His views are sought after by industry, he has published numerous books and papers, and he presents his work at professional seminars and conferences worldwide. His first maintenance-related book, Maintenance, Replacement and Reliability (1973) is in its 6th printing. He is co-editor with J.D. Campbell of Maintenance Excellence: Optimizing Equipment Life Cycle Decisions (2001); the second edition was published in 2010 as Asset Management Excellence: Optimizing Equipment Life-Cycle Decisions. The second edition of the bestselling Maintenance, Replacement & Reliability: Theory and Applications(2006), co-authored with Dr. A.H.C. Tsang, appeared in 2013.

In 1998, Professor Emeritus Jardine was the first recipient of the Sergio Guy Memorial Award from the Plant Engineering and Maintenance Association of Canada in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the maintenance profession and was elected a Fellow of both the Institute of Industrial Engineers and the Canadian Academy of Engineering in 2013. In 2013 he also received the Lifetime Achievement award from the International Society for Engineering Asset Management. In 2014 he was admitted to the status of Honorary Fellow of the International Society of Engineering Asset Management.

Research Areas

Advanced Manufacturing and Materials Engineering

Energy and Environmental Engineering

Biosketch

Olivera Kesler joined the University of Toronto in 2007 and initiated the Fuel Cell Materials and Manufacturing Laboratory, FCMML. The goal of all of the research work in FCMML is to enhance environmental sustainability by developing cleaner energy conversion technologies that reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions compared to combustion-based power generation methods. Research projects are conceived with the goal of tackling the largest challenges preventing the widespread use of fuel cell technologies – cost, durability, and reliability. The ultimate objective of the work is to facilitate the widest and fastest possible adoption of cleaner energy conversion technologies in order to maximize their environmental benefit.

The main focus of the research in FCMML is on solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) technology. SOFCs are the most efficient known energy conversion device for the production of electricity from a variety of fuels, including renewable biomass, hydrogen, or natural gas, with no smog-forming emissions. However, their use remains severely limited by high costs, as well as by low durability and reliability. Current projects are aimed at drastically lowering the cost and improving the durability of fuel cells through the use of new materials and processing techniques to produce fuel cells more rapidly using a process that is easily scaleable for mass production. Work is also focused on understanding the electrochemical performance and degradation behaviour of SOFCs, in order to develop strategies to increase their durability.

Research Areas

Operations Research

Biosketch

Mike Kim holds a PhD (2012) from the University of Toronto, and was previously an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California Berkeley (Industrial Engineering and Operations Research) and the National University of Singapore Business School (Decision Sciences) from 2012-2014.

His research focuses on the interplay between statistical learning (i.e. learning from data) and dynamic optimization (i.e. making adaptive decisions), with applications to problems that arise in operations research, business analytics, and maintenance and reliability. His work has appeared in journals such as Operations Research and Management Science.

Mike is the director of the Centre for Maintenance Optimization and Reliability Engineering (C-MORE), which focuses on real-world research in engineering asset management.

Research Areas

Operations Research

Biosketch

Roy H. Kwon is currently associate professor in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto, St. George Campus. Also, he is a member of the faculty in the Masters of Mathematical Finance (MMF) Program at U of T.

He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in operations research from the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering in 2002. His research focuses on financial engineering (portfolio optimization, asset allocation, risk management, and option pricing) and supply chain management (logistics and production control).

Dr. Kwon has published articles in such journals as Management Science, Naval Research Logistics, the European Journal of Operational Research, and Operations Research Letters, among others. In addition, he has worked and consulted in the use of operations research (optimization) for the military, financial, and service sectors.

Research Areas

Operations Research

Biosketch

Chi-Guhn Lee is an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. He received a B.S in industrial engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea and an M.S. in industrial engineering from KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), Daejon, Korea. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and joined the University of Toronto faculty in 2001.

Biosketch

Matthew Mackay is a Lecturer at the University of Toronto, specializing in teaching mechatronics, electronics, control systems, microcontrollers, and computer-aided design. His research areas include robotics, active vision, humanoid robotics, robotic control and robotic systems, and embedded systems. To date, he has contributed a number of refereed publications, conference papers, presentations, and other publications to the field. He will also be the faculty advisor for the newly-formed student Baja team. Lastly, he is actively involved in managing design projects and other student activities related to mechatronics and robotics.

Dr. Mackay completed his PhD thesis in the areas of Active Vision and Robotics in 2011 at the University of Toronto by pursuing the fast-track option. His research was funded by the NSERC scholarship program and the University of Toronto Fellowship. As part of his continued studies in the field, he has received a number of honors and awards, including the Dean’s Scholar Award from Queen’s University, and the Thomas F. LaPierre Award. He has also been actively involved throughout his studies in on-campus and off-campus robotics programs, such as FIRST robotics.

Research Areas

Operations Research

Biosketch

Professor Viliam Makis received his PhD from Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague in 1981 and is currently working as a Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto.

His research and teaching interests are in stochastic modeling, quality assurance, maintenance, reliability, production and inspection control, with special focus on investigating structural properties of the optimal policies for stochastic controlled systems. His recent research contributions have been in the area of modeling, estimation, and optimal control of partially observable processes with applications in condition-based maintenance and multivariate quality control. He has authored or co-authored 72 research articles published in refereed journals, 80 papers published in Conference Proceedings, more than 100 conference presentations, 3 books as the first author, 6 chapters in books, and 8 IP Disclosures. He successfully completed his Administrative responsibilities as the Chair of the Engineering Science Option: Manufacturing Systems at the University of Toronto in 2004. He has been serving as an editorial member of several reputed journals such as Advances in Operations Research (as an Editor), ISRN Probability and Statistics (as an Editor), Central European Journal of Engineering (as an Editor, Industrial Engineering), Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering, and the International Journal of Performability Engineering.

Professor Makis is a senior member of the Institute of Industrial Engineers, American Society for Quality, a member of INFORMS and CORS. He was honoured as a Fellow of the International Society of Engineering Asset Management (FISEAM) in October 2011.

Research Areas

Advanced Manufacturing and Materials Engineering

Biomedical Engineering

Energy and Environmental Engineering

Thermal and Fluid Sciences Engineering

Biosketch

Professor Andreas Mandelis is a Full Professor of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering; Electrical & Computer Engineering; and the Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering, University of Toronto. Dr. Mandelis’ fundamental research interests are focused on studies of physical processes in condensed and biological matter as they impact instrumentation science and signal generation. Examples are thermophysics, non-radiative and radiative physics of electronic, optical and biomedical materials, photoacoustic, photothermal and diffusion-wave phenomena in manufactured, electronic, biological and photonic media. Current interests include building theoretical and experimental system foundations of biothermophotonic and biophotoacoustic transport phenomena and frequency-domain instrumentation for imaging in hard (dental, bone) and soft tissues, novel biosensors and high-performance diagnostic imaging techniques. Culminating in his work on the foundations of the field of photoacoustic and diffusion waves in matter, his applied research interests span all aspects of instrumentation and measurement development for photoacoustic, photothermal, and diffusion-wave high-precision, high-dynamic-range analytical techniques leading to advanced non-destructive (non-invasive) inspection and monitoring technologies. Current application examples are in the fields of alternative energy conversion devices (e.g. solar cells, nano-optoelectronic devices), industrial manufactured products (steels, metal composites) and biomedical and dental diagnostics with major focus on advanced dynamic imaging instrumentation.

Professor Mandelis is the Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Diffusion-Wave Sciences and Technologies and a Fellow in the Academy of Sciences of The Royal Society of Canada. He has been selected for the Alexander von Humboldt Professor Award twice (in 2003 and 2012). He is the 2007 (inaugural) recipient of the Ontario Premier’s Discovery Award in Science and Engineering. He received the ASME 2009 Yeram Touloukian Award (and Medal) in Thermophysics, the Senior Prize of the International Photoacoustic and Photothermal Association, and the Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Industrial and Applied Physics. In 2010 he was awarded a Killam Research Fellowship from the Canada Council for the Arts. He is the recipient of the American Physical Society’s (APS) 2012 Joseph F. Keithley Award for Advances in Measurement Science and of the CAP-INO Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Applied Photonics. In 2013 he was selected as one of 10 recipients of the 2013 University of Toronto Inventors of the Year Award. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, the APS, the SPIE, the AAAS and the ASME.

Research Areas

Information Engineering

Human Factors/Ergonomics

Biosketch

Susan McCahan is currently the Vice Dean, Undergraduate in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering at the University of Toronto. She joined the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at Toronto in 1992. From 2006 to 2011 she served as Chair of First Year for the Faculty. Her research area is energy systems and engineering education. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in recognition of contributions to engineering education has been the recipient of several major teaching awards including the 3M National Teaching Fellowship and the Medal of Distinction in Engineering Education from Engineers Canada. She was also part of the team of instructors that received the Alan Blizzard Award for collaborative teaching in 2007. She has developed and taught courses on energy systems, heat transfer, and combustion. Professor McCahan's current research focuses on the design of the engineering education environment.

Research Areas

Advanced Manufacturing and Materials Engineering

Applied Mechanics and Design

Biosketch

Professor Shaker Meguid obtained his PhD in Applied Mechanics from UMIST, England. He taught different branches of Applied Mechanics in 4 continents, including Oxford University, Cranfield University (England), University of Toronto, Cairo University (Egypt) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU-Singapore). His research activities have contributed significantly to the areas of nanoengineering, computational mechanics, advanced and smart composites, fracture mechanics and failure prevention. He has published over 400 papers in leading tier-1 scientific journals and international conferences and symposia including the most recently the 4th International Conference on Integrity, Reliability and Failure in June 2013. He not only organised but also contributed to numerous symposia as keynote and plenary speaker. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Mechanics and Materials in Design, Guest Editor to a number of Journals, Former Technical Associate Editor, for two consecutive terms, of ASME Journal of Engineering Materials and Technology, and a member of the editorial board of numerous journals. He is also the Editor of six international conference proceedings and author of two textbooks.
Professor Meguid is the founding head of the Aerospace Division of NTU, Singapore. He holds the titles of Distinguished Visiting Professor in Tongji University (China), Porto University (Portugal), external examiner to Dublin Institute of Technology (Ireland), University of Putra Malaysia (Malaysia), and an Engineering Consultant to the United Nations. He is a lifetime member of AIAA, member of the American Academy of Mechanics, Professional Engineer in the Province of Ontario (P.Eng.), Chartered Engineer in Great Britain (CEng), Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and Fellow of IMechE. He works closely with the aerospace and automotive industries and is regularly approached by members of the media for clarification of engineering issues. Professor Meguid and his students have won many awards including the recent innovation award in nanoengineering by ASME. Professor Meguid is currently hosted by Peking University as Globex Fellow to teach Mechanics of Solids under the Global Exchange Program.

Research Areas

Human Factors/Ergonomics

Biosketch

Paul Milgram is a Professor in the Mechanical & Industrial Engineering Department at the University of Toronto, where he specialises in Human Factors Engineering. He is also cross-appointed to the Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering. He teaches courses in engineering psychology, research methods in human factors, and calculus.

Professor Milgram’s research theme relates to display, control and navigation issues in 3D (mixed reality) environments. His recent research has extended his long-term work with stereoscopic augmented reality to focus on applying digital imaging processing for enhancing operator displays.Application domains for his research include surgery, anaesthesiology, telerobotics, air traffic control and automobile driving.

Before joining U of T in 1986, Professor Milgram worked for 4 years as a senior human factors engineer at the National Aerospace Laboratory, in Amsterdam, prior to which he was a post-doctoral researcher at the TNO Institute for Perception, in Soesterberg, Netherlands. His research leaves abroad have included ATR in Kyoto, Japan (1993-94); the Centre d'Etudes de la Navigation Aérienne (CENA) in Toulouse, France (1999-2000); the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya in Barcelona (2004); the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa (2010); and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, in India (2011).

In the 1980s, Dr. Milgram developed the PLATO visual occlusion spectacles, and his company, Translucent Technologies, currently provides these worldwide, for research on, among other things, automobile interface design, visual perception, psycho-motor coordination, sports medicine, neurological disorders, and cognitive sciences.

Research Areas

Applied Mechanics and Design

Advanced Manufacturing and Materials Engineering

Robotics

Mechatronics and Instrumentation

Biosketch

James K. Mills joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Toronto in 1988. His research interests encompass a number of related areas, including: robot control, control of multi-robots, smart structure sensing and control, design of actuators, localization, development of fixtureless assembly technology, design and control of high speed machines, MEMS 3D assembly, MEMS robotic assembly task execution, micro-scale biological task control and automation. Collaborative work with colleagues in Hong Kong has led to methods for micro-scale cell task automation. He has published over 400 journal and conference papers and supervised over 50 MASc and PhD students and a number of Postdoctoral fellows and research engineers in these various research areas.

Professor Mills serves as Co-Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Information Acquisition, Editorial Board of the International Journal of Mechatronics and Automation. He has served on the program committees of numerous international conferences. He has been an Invited Visiting Professor at the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in Bangalore, India, a Visiting Professor at the University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, as well as City University, Hong Kong in the last several years.

Research Areas

Thermal and Fluid Sciences Engineering

Advanced Manufacturing and Materials Engineering

Biosketch

Dr. Javad Mostaghimi is the Distinguished Professor in Plasma Engineering in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto and the director of Centre for Advanced Coating Technologies (CACT). He received a BSc degree from Sharif University, Iran, in 1974, and MSc and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in 1978 and 1982, respectively. Before joining University of Toronto in 1990, he held positions at Pratt & Whitney Canada, Longueil, Quebec, and the Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Quebec.

His main research interests are the study of thermal spray coatings, transport phenomena and electromagnetics in thermal plasma sources; in particular, study of the flow, temperature, and electromagnetic fields within arcs and RF inductively coupled plasmas . Professor Mostaghimi has done extensive simulation of the dynamics of droplet impact and solidification in thermal spray processes and automotive spray painting.

Professor Mostaghimi is a fellow of the following professional societies: ASME, ASM, CSME, EIC, CAE, AAAS, and IUPAC. He is a recipient of the 75th Anniversary Medal of the ASME Heat Transfer Division, the recipient of the 2013 Robert W. Angus Medal of the CSME, 2012 Heat Transfer Memorial Award of the ASME, 2011 Jules Stachiewicz Medal of the CSME, 2010 NSERC Brockhouse Canada Prize and the 2009 Engineering Medal in R & D from the Professional Engineers of Ontario.

He is a member of the editorial board of Plasma Chemistry and Plasma Processing and a member of the International Review Board of the Journal of Thermal Spray.

Research Areas

Biomedical Engineering

Advanced Manufacturing and Materials Engineering

Applied Mechanics and Design

Biosketch

Hani Naguib is a Professor at the University of Toronto and Holder of Canada Research Chair in Smart and Functional Materials. He is jointly appointed to the department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering and the department of Materials Science and Engineering and cross appointed to the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering and affiliated with the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute. He is the founding director of the Toronto Institute for Advanced Manufacturing. His research scope encompass the area of advanced materials and manufacturing, and enabling materials and technologies. His major expertise is in the area of manufacturing of emerging materials includes: smart and active materials; macromolecules and composites; and bio-based materials. His group has applied these materials in a range of industrial and health care technologies such as multifunctional materials, sensors and actuators, energy management materials, artificial muscles, smart textiles, biomedical and clinical devices. He has many refereed publications, scholarly addresses, and technical seminars to date in the field.

Naguib is the recipient of numerous honors and awards such as the Canada Research Chair, the Premier’s Early Research Award of Ontario, the Canada Foundation of Innovation, and the faculty Early Teaching Award. He is a Professional Engineer in Canada, a Chartered Engineer in U.K., a Fellow of the Institute of Materials Minerals and Mining IOM3 in UK, Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers ASME, Fellow of the Society of Plastics Engineers SPE and Fellow of the Canadian Society of Mechanical Engineers CSME. He has been serving on the technical divisions’ board of directors for the Society of Plastics Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Materials Information Society, and the Canadian Society of Mechanical Engineers. He has been organizing and chairing various technical sessions, symposia and seminars in national and international conferences in advanced materials and manufacturing. He is the Associate Editor of the IOP Journal of Smart Materials, Journal of Cellular Plastics and Cellular Polymers. Naguib’s research group has made a strong contribution to internationally competitive research and has communicated, collaborated, and formed partnerships with industry, research institutes, and universities in studies of large scale materials and manufacturing projects. The main goal of his research program is to develop sustainable and transformational materials and manufacturing for the energy management, transportation and health care sectors.

In addition to his research, Naguib is active in teaching topics in Mechanical and Materials Engineering, he has developed both undergraduate and graduate curricula covering series of courses and labs including: Materials Science, Mechanics of Materials, Smart Materials and Structures, Macromolecular Materials, Composite Materials and Advanced Manufacturing. He has also served as the associate chair undergraduate studies for the department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto.

Research Areas

Applied Mechanics and Design

Biomedical Engineering

Robotics

Mechatronics and Instrumentation

Advanced Manufacturing and Materials Engineering

Human Factors/Ergonomics

Biosketch

Goldie Nejat, PhD, P.Eng. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto, and the Founder and Director of the Autonomous Systems and Biomechatronics (ASBLab) Laboratory. Dr. Nejat is also an Adjunct Scientist at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute. She received both her BASc and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Toronto.

Dr. Nejat is a world renowned expert in developing intelligent service/personal robots for applications in health, elderly care, emergency response, search and rescue, security and surveillance, and manufacturing. A major goal of her research is to develop and integrate intelligent socially assistive robots for assistive human-robot interactions (HRI) in healthcare facilities, private homes and for high stress and dangerous jobs. Dr. Nejat’s research is leading the development of intelligent assistive robotic aids that can meet the challenges posed by an aging population. She collaborates with international researchers, healthcare experts and healthcare facilities to develop robots and devices that can be effectively transferred and integrated into people’s everyday lives. Dr. Nejat is helping to change the face of robotics and her work is at the forefront of robotics research. Her research is constantly pushing the envelope of the capabilities of current robots.

In 2008, Dr. Nejat received an NSERC University Faculty Award. She also received the 2012 Professional Engineers of Ontario Young Engineer Medal and the 2013 Engineers Canada Young Engineer Achievement Award, both awards are for her exceptional achievements in the field of robotics at a young age.

Research: Thermodynamics of contact angles, wetting and adhesion generalization of the classical theory of capillarity to high curvature situations; Applications of Digital Image Analysis and Processing to interfacial tension and other surface science problems; Modelling of cell and protein adhesion to synthetic and natural biomaterials; Applications of surface thermodynamics to biotechnological problems.

Research Areas

Biomedical Engineering

Energy and Environmental Engineering

Biosketch

Dr. Neumann has received his Dr.rer.nat in Chemical Physics, at University of Mainz, Germany in 1962, his habilitation in Physical Chemistry of Surfaces, at University of Stuttgart, Germany, 1972. He is currently Professor Emeritus of the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto.

During his career he has produced approximately 450 publications. His research interests include: Fundamental surface thermodynamic studies from both experimental and theoretical points of view, including: contact angle phenomena and surface energetic; Development of novel methodologies in applied surface thermodynamics: Application of image analysis and computer-aided techniques in measurements of surface thermodynamic properties such as surface tension, contact angle, and line tension; Applications of thermodynamics to process of biomedical relevance: Novel methodology for the energetic characterization of biosurfaces, most recently in lung physiology, specifically the role and function of lung surfactants.

Research Areas

Advanced Manufacturing and Materials Engineering

Thermal and Fluid Sciences Engineering

Biosketch

Chul B. Park is a world leader in the development of innovative, cost-effective technologies for the foamed plastics. Dr. Park has been extensively involved in industrial projects both in consulting and research contracts on various foam processes including microcellular processing, inert gas-injection processing, rotational foam molding, wood-fiber composites, and open-cell foams.

Since 1993, he directed the Microcellular Plastics Manufacturing Laboratory at the University of Toronto and has been involved in pioneering work on the concepts of microcellular foaming. The laboratory is recognized as the leading facility in the world for research and development of microcellular plastic foams.

Dr. Park’s innovative research in this area indicates that the successful production of microcellular automotive parts could have a major impact on industry. Metallic components, for example, could be replaced with plastic ones, resulting in crucial weight reduction; the introduction of microcellular foams could further reduce part weights, as well as production and operational costs. These weight reductions could also contribute to improved fuel economy and reduced CO2 emissions.

For over a decade, he has led the Consortium for cellular and Microcellular Plastics (CCMCP) with 20+ industrial sponsors from Canada and around the world. The Consortium has developed state-of-the-art technologies for manufacturing process and production in plastic foaming, which have been widely adopted by a large number of companies in their production.

In recognition of his outstanding research achievements, he has received numerous honors and awards in his career. The recent awards include: the NSERC Strategic Network Grant ($5M) in 2010, the Julian C Smith Award from the Engineering Institute of Canada in 2010, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2010, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2012, the C.N. Downing Award from the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering in 2012, the M. Eugene Merchant Manufacturing Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers / Society of Manufacturing Engineers in 2012, and Fellow of the Korean Academy of Science of Technology in 2012.

Biosketch

Scott Sanner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering. Previously Scott was an Assistant Professor at Oregon State University and before that he was a Principal Researcher at National ICT Australia (NICTA) and Adjunct Faculty at the Australian National University. Scott earned a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto (2008), an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University (2002), and a double BS in Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (1999).
Scott's research spans a broad range of topics from the data-driven fields of Machine Learning and Information Retrieval to the decision-driven fields of Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research. Scott has applied the analytic and algorithmic tools from these fields to diverse application areas such as recommender systems, interactive text visualization, and Smart Cities applications including transport optimization.
Scott has served as Program Co-chair for the 26th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), member of the Editorial Board for the Artificial Intelligence Journal (AIJ) and the Machine Learning Journal (MLJ), and Electronic Editor for the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR). Scott was a co-recipient of the 2014 AIJ Prominent Paper Award.

Biosketch

Vahid Sarhangian is a postdoctoral research scholar in the Division of Decision, Risk, and Operations at Columbia Business School. He holds a PhD degree in Operations Management and a MASc degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Toronto. His research interests are in performance analysis and control of complex stochastic systems with an emphasis on applications in the service and healthcare industries. In his current research he draws on queueing theory and dynamic optimization to develop innovative models for nurse staffing in emergency departments.

Research Areas

Human Factors/Ergonomics

Applied Mechanics and Design

Energy and Environmental Engineering

Information Engineering

Biosketch

Professor Shu obtained graduate degrees in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in the fields of human-computer interaction in computer-aided design (SM) and design for remanufacture as an approach to environmentally responsible product design (PhD). Professor Shu’s current research focus is designing products that enable environmentally conscious (also known as pro-environmental or sustainable) behavior in consumers.

Professor Shu is active in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), serving as the DTM (Design Theory and Methodology) Committee Chair in 2009, DTM Conference Chair in 2008, and DTM Program Chair in 2007. Professor Shu is a fellow of the CIRP (International Academy for Production Engineering Research), and was awarded the CIRP F.W. Taylor Medal Award in 2004. Professor Shu also served on the Advisory Board of the Design Society from 2003-2009 and is on the advisory board/program committee for several international design conferences and editorial board for several journals.

Research Areas

Applied Mechanics and Design

Biomedical Engineering

Biosketch

Craig A. Simmons is an Associate Professor and the Canada Research Chair in Mechanobiology at the University of Toronto with cross-appointments to the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, the Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering, and the Faculty of Dentistry. He received his BSc (Eng) from the University of Guelph (1991), SM from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1994), and PhD from the University of Toronto (2000). He then completed an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Michigan (2000-02) and an American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania (2002-04) before returning to the University of Toronto faculty in 2005.

Professor Simmons leads a talented research group in fundamental and applied investigations into the processes by which biomechanical forces regulate tissue regeneration and disease. Using principles of biomechanics, cell and molecular biology, and tissue engineering, his team investigates the mechanobiological factors that cause heart valve disease; seeks strategies to regenerate tissues using stem cells; and creates novel biomedical microdevices.

Professor Simmons is the recipient of the 2006 Ontario Early Researcher Award, the 2009 Early Career Teaching Award in the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto, the 2010 McCharles Prize for early career research distinction, and the 2012 McLean Award for recognition as an emerging research leader. He currently serves as Interim Associate Director, Research of the Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering and is Director of the NSERC CREATE Program in Program in Microfluidic Applications and Training in Cardiovascular Health (MATCH).

Tony Sinclair is a Fellow of the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering (CSME), and was Chair of the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto, 2004-2009. He is a past winner of the Faculty Teaching Award for the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering at U of T. He is on the editorial board of NDT&E International, and has supervised approximately 60 graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and research associates, plus 90 undergraduate thesis students.

Research Areas

Energy and Environmental Engineering

Thermal and Fluid Sciences Engineering

Biosketch

David Sinton is a Professor and Associate Chair of Research in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. He was the 2012-2015 Director of the Institute for Sustainable Energy. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, Dr. Sinton was an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Victoria, and a Visiting Associate Professor at Cornell University. He received a BASc from University of Toronto, MEng from McGill University and PhD from University of Toronto.

Dr. Sinton's research interests are in fluidics and energy. This research involves the study and application of small scale fluid mechanics (microfluidics, nanofluidics, and optofluidics) for use in energy systems and analysis. He received the 2006 Canadian Society of Mechanical Engineering I. W. Smith Award, the 2006 Douglas R. Colton Award from CMC Microsystems, the 2007 Award for Teaching Excellence from the University of Victoria Faculty of Engineering, and the 2008 Early Career Achievement Award from the U of T Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering. He became a Fellow of the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering in 2012, a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2013, and a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada in 2015. He was the University of Toronto McLean Senior Fellow in 2013-2014.

Research Areas

Biosketch

Dr. Jan K. Spelt, P.Eng., has been a Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto since 1988, and is cross-appointed to the Department of Materials Science & Engineering. He is also an adjunct professor at Ryerson University. Prior to this he worked with Alcan International. His research interests include microelectronic packaging, adhesive joining, and applications of controlled erosion such as abrasive jet micro-machining and vibratory surface finishing.

Professor Spelt collaborates with many companies in his research, and is a fellow of the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering (CSME). He has supervised or co-supervised 25 PhD students, 43 MASc students, 27 MEng students, and 13 postdoctoral researchers. He is the author or co-author of more than 156 journal publications, 14 book contributions, and has participated in a large number of national and international conferences.

Research Areas

Biomedical Engineering

Biosketch

Professor Steinman completed his doctoral studies in Computational Hemodynamics at the University of Toronto in 1993. From 1993-1996 he did postdoctoral work in Magnetic Resonance Imaging at the Robarts Research Institute in London, Ontario, after which he became a Robarts Scientist and Assistant then Associate Professor of Medical Biophysics and Diagnostic Radiology & Nuclear Medicine at the University of Western Ontario. In 2005 he returned to the University of Toronto, where he is currently a Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering and the Institute of Biomedical Engineering.

Professor Steinman is recognized as a pioneer in the integration of medical imaging and computational modelling, and their use in the study of cardiovascular disease development, diagnosis and treatment. His current research focuses on improving rupture risk prediction for cerebral aneurysms; elucidating the nature of turbulence in blood flow; developing an interactive ultrasound training simulator; and developing ‘art-inspired’ flow visualization techniques. He has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers, and is the co-founder of the widely-used Vascular Modelling ToolKit. He was previously an Associate Editor for the ASME Journal of Biomechanical Engineering, and currently serves on the review boards of several international journals. He was Chair of the Fluids Committee for ASME's Bioengineering Division, and in 2012 was elected Fellow of the ASME. Continuously since 1998, Professor Steinman has been the recipient of competitive salary awards from the Heart & Stroke Foundation, and currently holds a Mid-Career Investigator Award.

Research Areas

Thermal and Fluid Sciences Engineering

Biomedical Engineering

Applied Mechanics and Design

Energy and Environmental Engineering

Biosketch

Professor Pierre Sullivan's research interests span flow phenomena, energy conservation and micro-scale electrohydrodynamics. His work has examined novel physical insight into the area of micro-scale jets and electrowetting on dielectric droplet motion. In aerodynamic control, was initiated with acoustic control leading to the current work installing synthetic jets directly onto the wing. This work is focused on low-speed (1-5 kW) wind turbines and micro-air vehicles. This work has included difficult near-wall measurements, flow visualization and careful analysis to describe the actions of the two control mechanisms.

Most interestingly, his group has found a dependence on Reynolds number that allowed the identification of fundamental frequencies important to the shear layer vortices. This improves control schemes for the devices. In addition to this, through a number of collaborations he has embarked on an experimental and numerical study of bileaflet mechanical heart valves. He has developed a unique well-validated particle image velocimetry dataset that is much larger than any previously available and has made this available as an open dataset. This work has recently been modeled with Large Eddy Simulation to fully characterize difficult to measure turbulent stresses and statistics.

Professor Sullivan was named fellow of the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering (CSME) in 2012. He completed his BSME and MSME from Clarkson University in 1988 and 1991 respectively, and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Queen's University in 1995.

Research Areas

Robotics

Mechatronics and Instrumentation

Biomedical Engineering

Biosketch

Yu Sun is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering (MIE) and is jointly appointed in the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering (IBBME) and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Toronto (U of T). He is the Canada Research Chair in Micro and Nano Engineering Systems. Professor Sun is a former Director of U of T’s central Nanofabrication Centre. He received his PhD degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2003. His postdoc training was at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH-Zürich).

Sun is on the editorial boards of several IEEE Transactions, two Nature sponsored journals (Scientific Reports; Microsystems & Nanoengineering), and the IoP Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering. He was the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Academic Early Career Award recipient in 2010 “for contributions to enabling microrobotic and MEMS technologies for automated cell manipulation and characterization in cell biology and clinical applications”. In 2013, he was awarded an NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship as one of the six awardees selected from across all fields of natural sciences and engineering across Canada. He was elected Fellow of CSME (Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering), EIC (Engineering Institute of Canada), AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers), IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), and CAE (Canadian Academy of Engineering) for his work on micro-nano devices and robotic systems.

Research Areas

Energy and Environmental Engineering

Thermal and Fluid Sciences Engineering

Biosketch

Dr. Murray Thomson is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto where he is the Director of the Combustion Research Laboratory. He is also cross-appointed with the Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry. He received a BEng from McGill University (1986) and PhD from University of California, Berkeley (1994).

Professor Thomson is the Director of the NSERC CREATE Program in Clean Combustion Engines. He is on the organizing committee of the biennial International Sooting Flame Workshop, and the Board of Directors of the Canadian Section of the Combustion Institute. He is a member of the Research Management Committee and a Theme Leader of the BiofuelNet Canada NSERC National Centre of Excellence.

Professor Thomson’s research is in the area of combustion with a focus on pollutant formation, biofuels, combustion modeling and optical sensors. He has supervised the thesis research of 61 graduate students and published 62 journal publications. He has developed 4 sensors that had patent applications and were commercialised with Canadian partner companies (Tenova, Unisearch and Resonance). He is a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada (EIC) and the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering (CSME).

Biosketch

Marianne Touchie joined the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor in July 2016 and is cross-appointed in the Departments of Civil Engineering and Mechanical & Industrial Engineering.
She completed her BASc (2009) and PhD (2014) in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Toronto. Upon completion of her PhD, Dr. Touchhie became the Building Research Manager at the Toronto Atmospheric Fund and was also a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto.
Dr. Touchie’s research focuses on improving the energy performance and indoor environmental quality of existing buildings to make them more comfortable, healthy and sustainable through comprehensive retrofits. This work includes monitoring and characterizing building energy performance and environmental parameters such as temperature, mean radiant temperature, relative humidity, air velocity and leakage, lighting levels and contaminant concentrations to determine the influence of potential retrofit approaches, both active and passive. Much of her research has been in the multi-unit residential sector and particularly social housing buildings.
Dr. Touchie is also the Academic Director and Chair of the Building Science Specialist of Ontario (BSSO) Committee for the Ontario Building Envelope Council (OBEC).

Research Areas

Thermal and Fluid Sciences Engineering

Energy and Environmental Engineering

Biosketch

Professor Jim Wallace is Director of the Engine Research and Development Laboratory at the University of Toronto. He has more than 30 years of experience conducting research on the topics of internal combustion engines, combustion, and fuels. The engine lab specializes in the combustion of alternative fuels, including biodiesel, bio-oil, and biogas, methanol, natural gas, propane and hydrogen in spark ignition and diesel engines. The focus of the work is on reducing engine exhaust emissions. Current research ranges from fundamental ignition studies of natural gas injected in diesel engines, a study of the effect of ethanol-gasoline blends on GDI engine PM emissions, and a study of the potential health benefits of using diesel particulate filters. He was made a Fellow of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) in 2001 for his contributions in the area of alternative fuels. He is also a Fellow of the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering (CSME) and the Engineering Institute of Canada (EIC) and received the Robert W. Angus Medal from the CSME in 2011.

Professor Wallace served as Chair of the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering from 1998-2003. He received the 2011 Faculty Teaching Award from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering and the 2012 President’s Teaching Award from the University of Toronto. He is a member of the University of Toronto’s Teaching Academy.

Research Areas

Energy and Environmental Engineering

Thermal and Fluid Sciences Engineering

Biosketch

Charles Albert Ward received his BSc from the University of Texas, Arlington, and his doctorate from Northwestern University. He joined the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Toronto in 1967, and was promoted to Professor in 1977.

Currently, he is the Director of the Thermodynamics and Kinetics Laboratory. A theory for predicting the rate of molecular transport across phase boundaries—Statistical Rate Theory—was developed in his lab. It has been cited in the open literature over 400 times. He and his students have published over one hundred papers in peer-reviewed journals. His studies of interfacial kinetics led to the measurement of a temperature discontinuity at the liquid-vapour interface during evaporation and to the measurement of a new property of water: the surface thermal capacity. This property defines the energy transport by surface-tension-driven flow.

The Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering (CSME) has recognized his research contributions. In 1988 he received the Robert W. Angus Medal in recognition of a paper on surface science and in 2008 he received the Jules Stachiewiez Medal for his contributions to heat transfer.

Research Areas

Biomedical Engineering

Biosketch

Lidan You is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto with cross-appointments in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering (MIE) and the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering (IBBME). She received her PhD degree in mechanical engineering from the City University of New York in 2002. Dr. You continued her postdoc training at Stanford University before she joined the University of Toronto as a faculty member in 2006.

Dr. You received the Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation in 2009 and the Duggan Medal from Canadian Society of Mechanical Engineering (CSME) in 2011. She is a registered Professional Engineer in Ontario, and a member of the Orthopedics Research Society, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Canadian Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Biomedical Engineering Society, and the American Society of Bone and Mineral Research.

Dr. You is the director of Cellular Biomechanics Laboratory at U of T. Her research is focused on solving biomechanical questions in muscular skeletal system at the cellular level. In specific, her team is working on the anti-resorptive effect of mechanical loading on bone tissue; pressure effect on bone cell mechanotransduction; osteogenic potential of high frequency low magnitude vibration on bone adaptation; angiogenesis involvement in initiation of bone resorption under disuse condition; the advanced microfluidic system for bone cell mechanotransduction study; the role of focal adhesion assembly in cell mechanosensitivity using micropatterned surface; and the development of advanced artificial bone matrix by employing novel microfabrication technologies.

Research Areas

Thermal and Fluid Sciences Engineering

Biomedical Engineering

Biosketch

Edmond W.K. Young joined the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor in January 2013. He received his BASc (2001) and MASc (2003) in Mechanical Engineering at the University of British Columbia, and his PhD in Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto (2008). He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2009 to 2012, working at the Wisconsin Institute for Medical Research (WIMR).

Professor Young’s research interests focus on the development of microscale technologies for cell biology applications, with emphasis on creating engineered models that mimic the cell and tissue microenvironments in both healthy and diseased animals. This interdisciplinary research area requires combining the principles and techniques of microfabrication, fluid mechanics, material science, cell biology, and cell imaging and microscopy. In 2009, he received the Governor General’s Gold Medal and the Norman F. Moody Award for academic excellence, and in 2015 was awarded the CIHR-ICR CCRDP New PI Award.”

Research: Mechanical vibrations and dynamic analysis of mechanical systems with particular focus on automotive applications; development of bio-instruments for characterization and diagnosis of tissue viscoelastic property and for tissue engineering research. Research areas: Vibrations, dynamics, and design; Energy harvesting; Bio-instrument.

Research Areas

Robotics

Mechatronics and Instrumentation

Applied Mechanics and Design

Biosketch

Jean Zu graduated with BSc in 1984 and MSc in 1986 from Tsinghua University. After two years of working as a lecturer and researcher at Tsinghua University, she came to Canada, and obtained her PhD from the University of Manitoba in 1993. In January 1994, Dr. Zu joined the University of Toronto, Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering as an Assistant Professor. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 1999 and to Full Professor in 2004. From June 2008 to June 2009, she served as Associate Chair of Research. She currently serves as Chair of the Department (from July 1, 2009).

Jean Zu's research is focused on mechanical vibrations and dynamics, and mechatronics. She has successfully collaborated with many different companies on research projects with focus on automotive applications. In recent years, Jean Zu has extended her research to mechatronics areas in biomedical instruments and energy harvesting. She has published over 300 papers including 160 journal papers and has supervised 70 graduate students. She is Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering (CAE), American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME), Engineering Institute of Canada (EIC), Canadian Society of Mechanical Engineering (CSME), and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She served as President of CSME in 2006-08 and served on NSERC Grant Selection Committee in 2004-07.She served as the Associate Editor of ASME Journal of Vibration and Acoustics in 2007-2013 and was President of Engineering Institute of Canada (EIC) in 2012-2014. She currently serves on several editorial boards.